Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
16 Aug 2025 · 3 min
0:00
In this episode of the Double Your Profit series, the host coaches business leaders on tightening performance and behavioral standards to drive higher results. He argues that organizations get what they allow, so setting clear, documented expectations is essential. The process begins with defining concise standards—ranging from dress code and personal hygiene to concrete performance metrics like jobs per day, closing rate, and ticket size—and writing them down. These standards are then embedded everywhere: job descriptions, one‑on‑one meetings, office scorecards, and regular manager updates. The host stresses that once standards are in place, any deviation—whether in quantitative performance or qualitative behavior—must be addressed quickly. He illustrates this with a case where a top‑performing employee was terminated for failing to meet customer‑experience and cultural expectations. Leadership, from senior to frontline, is responsible for communicating, monitoring, and reacting to standards. Rapid response can include coaching, mentoring, peer support, or termination, but the key is not to delay action, as hesitation erodes accountability and culture. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to like and subscribe.
Chapters
Welcome back to the Double Your Profit series. Today we are talking about tightening your standards. The way I like to think about this is you get what you allow. Performance will happen for whatever the lowest set of standards that you allow to happen. So when you are starting to set standards, here's a couple ground rules to help figure it out for your team. First one, be clear and concise. We have to have a goal. We have to have a written, documented, this is my standard. So my standard is uniform shirts, Somewhat clean hair, don't smell like you drank your breakfast. You could have performance metrics in there like number of jobs a day, average closing rate, average ticket, total performance. You can add really anything in there that you want, but the important part here is setting clear and consistent expectations. And if you don't set those, then you're going to get low performance because people really don't know what they should be aiming for. Once you've sort of done that initial groundwork of documenting what you expect on a per-person basis, what you want to then do is start sharing it as broadly Broadly as you can. We put it into every single job description. We put it into every single one-on-one that a manager had with their team member. We put scorecards using those metrics all over the office. We speak with the managers on how their team's doing. We speak with the managers with how they're doing, and we're constantly using the scorecards that we created that are the standards that we've set. And if someone dips below those standards on a performance or qualitative, how they're acting inside the home, how they're acting around the office, we have a very clear guideline for what we expect. We had an example a couple months ago where we had a high performer, someone that was doing great numbers. So on the performance side of their job, they were doing excellent, but how they were acting inside the home did not really align with the standards that we've set. Like, we want a minimum 5-star reviews, we want good customer experience, we want someone to represent our business the way that we would want it to be represented. And this person was not doing that. So despite having great performance, they missed the other expectations that we had for them. So we had to let them go because they were not representing us in the way that we would've wanted. Leadership sets the bar here, and that's from the top of the org chart to your senior leaders or your frontline leaders. But what they allow will become the culture. My final thought on standards and expectations is react fast. If someone is doing something that is clearly counter to the type of behaviors that you want on your team, then you need to enforce and react fast. Now, reacting doesn't need to be termination. Reacting can be coaching. Reacting can be mentoring. It can be giving them a peer mentor that is doing the type of behavior years of performance that you want. But the biggest mistake that companies make is they wait too long to attack a problem because they're uncomfortable with it. So what happens when that guy missed his number? What happened when that guy said something a little bit weird at a customer's house? How do you handle it and how do you train it? And that's where the leadership side of this really comes out. The leaders are the ones enforcing these standards, and you have to react fast so that you can continue to create the culture of accountability that you're striving for. But you can also keep great guys that probably just need a little bit of help in that moment. If you liked this video, make sure you like and sub so you don't miss the next few.
